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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > General
This Element outlines current issues in the study of the pragmatics
of fiction. It starts from the premise that fictional texts are
complex and multi-layered communicative acts which deserve
attention in pragmatic research in their own right, and it
highlights the need to understand them as cultural artefacts rich
in possibilities to explore pragmatic effects and pragmatic
theorising. The issues covered are (1) the participation structure
of fictional texts, (2) the performance aspect of fictional texts,
(3) the interaction between readers and viewers and the fictional
texts, as well as (4) the pragmatic effects of drawing on indexical
linguistic features for evoking ideologies in characterisation.
This Element addresses translation issues within an interpersonal
pragmatics frame. The aims of this Element are twofold: first, we
survey the current state of the field of pragmatics in translation;
second, we present the current and methodologically innovative
avenues of research in the field. We focus on three pragmatics
issues - relational work, participation structure, and mediality -
that we foreground as promising loci of research on translational
data. By reviewing the trajectory of pragmatics research on
translation/interpreting over time, and then outlining our
understanding of the Pragmatics in Translation as a field, we
arrive at a set of potential research questions which represent
desiderata for future research. These questions identify the paths
that can be productively explored through synergies of the
linguistic pragmatics framework and translation data. In two case
study chapters, we offer two example studies addressing some of the
questions we identified as suggestions for future research.
After shaking up writing classrooms at more than 550 colleges,
universities, and high schools, Understanding Rhetoric, the
comic-style guide to writing, has returned for a third edition!
Understanding Rhetoric encourages deep engagement with core
concepts of writing and rhetoric. With brand-new coverage of fake
news, sourcing the source, podcasting as publishing, and support
for common writing assignments, the new edition of the one and only
composition comic covers what students need to know--and does so
with fun and flair.
Literary Semiotics brings much needed revitalization to the
conservatism of modern semiotic theory. Scott Simpkins' revisionist
work scrutinizes the conflicting views on sign theory to identify
new areas of development in semiotic thought and practice,
particularly in relation to literary theory. Focusing on the idea
of semiotics as a "conversation" about sign theory and practice,
Simpkins principally looks at the work of Umberto Eco, while giving
secondary attention to some of semiotics' most influential
commentators: including Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Foucault,
Barthes, Kristeva, and Derrida. As an engaged interrogation of the
restraints on the practice of semiotics, Literary Semiotics is a
provocative study for semioticians, literary theorists, and
scholars of cultural studies and a resource for students seeking a
probing examination of the theory of signs.
The Sociolinguistics Reader presents a state-of-the-art account of
the discipline in the closing years of the twentieth century.
Volume 2: Gender and Discourse in the first section looks at
patterns of language variation, examining how gender identities are
accomplished through language, and the importance of gender in
accounting for language behaviour. Section II, meanwhile, examines
the sociolinguistic issues surrounding discourse, with reference to
the communication of affective meaning, conversational routines,
grammaticalisation and language change, intertextuality,
cross-cultural discourse patterns and their social implications.
Bringing together papers written by Norman Fairclough over a 25
year period, Critical Discourse Analysis represents a comprehensive
and important contribution to the development of this popular
field. The book is divided into seven sections covering the
following themes: language in relation to ideology and power
discourse in processes of social and cultural change dialectics of
discourse, dialectical relations between discourse and other
moments of social life methodology of critical discourse analysis
research analysis of political discourse discourse in globalisation
and transition critical language awareness in education The new
edition has been extensively revised and enlarged to include a
total of twenty two papers. It will be of value to researchers in
the subject and should prove essential reading for advanced
undergraduate and postgraduate students in Linguistics and other
areas of social science.
This book is a scholarly work of forensic linguistics that
demonstrates how the principles of Gricean pragmatics and their
recent elaboration in Information Manipulation Theory (IMT) can be
of use to courts faced with deciding cases of allegedly fraudulent
disclosure documents. The usual goal of legal rules for disclosure
documents is not merely to prevent lying but other forms of
deception as well. In particular, the goal of these rules is to
force the communicator to reveal information that could cause
material harm to certain receivers, harms that the communicator,
for various reasons of self-interest, might prefer to keep secret
or hidden. Because IMT and the Gricean framework have seldom been
used in published studies to investigate legally mandated
disclosure documents aimed at laypersons, this book seeks to enrich
current explications of the rhetorical "workings" of deceptive
disclosures within the broader Gricean tradition of pragmatics. The
book questions the fundamental relationships among Grice's maxims
as well as the much circulated notion that violation of some maxims
is more deceptive and more immoral than violations of others. In
addition, the book also attempts to show how various other theories
and research in discourse linguistics and reading comprehension can
be used to support IMT analyses in addressing the discourse
processing issues unique to legally required disclosure texts. In
this way the book contributes to the larger dual mission of the
field of forensic linguistics, which is both to understand and to
improve courts' impact on social justice.
When data consist of grouped observations or clusters, and there is
a risk that measurements within the same group are not independent,
group-specific random effects can be added to a regression model in
order to account for such within-group associations. Regression
models that contain such group-specific random effects are called
mixed-effects regression models, or simply mixed models. Mixed
models are a versatile tool that can handle both balanced and
unbalanced datasets and that can also be applied when several
layers of grouping are present in the data; these layers can either
be nested or crossed. In linguistics, as in many other fields, the
use of mixed models has gained ground rapidly over the last decade.
This methodological evolution enables us to build more
sophisticated and arguably more realistic models, but, due to its
technical complexity, also introduces new challenges. This volume
brings together a number of promising new evolutions in the use of
mixed models in linguistics, but also addresses a number of common
complications, misunderstandings, and pitfalls. Topics that are
covered include the use of huge datasets, dealing with non-linear
relations, issues of cross-validation, and issues of model
selection and complex random structures. The volume features
examples from various subfields in linguistics. The book also
provides R code for a wide range of analyses.
Despite the undeniably impressive achievements of the EU, forms of
resistance to the European integration process remain strong in
numerous quarters. Drawing upon a theoretical framework centred on
the dimension of discourse as social practice, this book takes the
literature on EU discourse a step further by integrating insights
from discourse studies with key models derived from the domain of
political science. The aim is to explore how recent socio-political
transformations have affected the way in which the EU discursively
represents itself as a legitimate political entity. The idea behind
this cross-disciplinary approach is that discourse theory can
contribute to a critical renewal of EU studies by drawing attention
to the rhetorical aspects that are constitutive of social
structures and identities. The analytical parts of this
corpus-assisted study explore the evolution of discursive practices
in various EU genres at two disruptive moments in the recent
history of European integration: the rejection of the draft EU
Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands and the UK
referendum on EU membership.
Reading, like any human activity, has a history. Modern reading is
a silent and solitary activity. Ancient reading was usually oral,
either aloud, in groups, or individually, in a muffled voice. The
text format in which thought has been presented to readers has
undergone many changes in order to reach the form that the modern
Western reader now views as immutable and nearly universal. This
book explains how a change in writing--the introduction of word
separation--led to the development of silent reading during the
period from late antiquity to the fifteenth century.
Over the course of the nine centuries following Rome's fall, the
task of separating the words in continuous written text, which for
half a millennium had been a function of the individual reader's
mind and voice, became instead a labor of professional readers and
scribes. The separation of words (and thus silent reading)
originated in manuscripts copied by Irish scribes in the seventh
and eighth centuries but spread to the European continent only in
the late tenth century when scholars first attempted to master a
newly recovered corpus of technical, philosophical, and scientific
classical texts.
Why was word separation so long in coming? The author finds the
answer in ancient reading habits with their oral basis, and in the
social context where reading and writing took place. The ancient
world had no desire to make reading easier and swifter. For various
reasons, what modern readers view as advantages--retrieval of
reference information, increased ability to read "difficult" texts,
greater diffusion of literacy--were not seen as advantages in the
ancient world. The notion that a larger portion of the population
should be autonomous and self-motivated readers was entirely
foreign to the ancient world's elitist mentality.
The greater part of this book describes in detail how the new
format of word separation, in conjunction with silent reading,
spread from the British Isles and took gradual hold in France,
Germany, Italy, and Spain. The book concludes with the triumph of
silent reading in the scholasticism and devotional practices of the
late Middle Ages.
This book offers in-depth qualitative case studies of 70 acts of
quoting verbatim performed by 16 US speakers across a range of
public settings. While their written versions unequivocally index
the other voice via quotation marks, the video data drawn from the
internet largely lack any non-verbal cues. Contrary to expectation,
the quotations' verbatimness is hardly ever translated into the
gradient media: It neither stands out by vocal parameters (pauses,
pitch, or intensity) when analyzed acoustically with Praat; nor are
(manual) gestures, shift of gaze or body posture called on to serve
as regular discriminating quoting practices. In general, the other
voice is effectively found backgrounded, if not suppressed, in its
oral performance, unless explicitly introduced by a digital
quotative.
This book aims at bridging language research and language teaching
and contains four sections. It opens with two papers which relate
language to literature: one exploring childlike language, the
second investigating the distinction between literary and
non-literary text categorization principles. Next are the papers on
multicultural and sociolinguistic topics, including a paper on
English as an international language, and two papers on the
perception of bilingualism in education. The third thematic section
explores semantics, with two papers on prefixes and one on
metaphor. The final thematic section is dedicated to syntax, with
one paper on complex predicates, one on syntactic complexity in
spontaneous spoken language and one of Croatian null and overt
subject pronouns.
The volume deals with the topic of illocutionary shell nouns in
English, i.e. nouns that encapsulate a content that is usually
expressed in a complement or in a separate sentence or clause, and
report or characterize it as a specific speech act. The book
reports a usage-based study of the complementation patterns in a
corpus of 335 illocutionary nouns distributed across the five
Searlean classes of assertive, commissive, directive, expressive,
and declarative nouns. The investigation aims to verify the
association between the meaning of these nouns and their
complementation patterns, and between their semantic similarity and
the similarity in the distribution of complementation patterns.
Knowledge and Self-Knowledge in Plato's Theaetetus advances a new
explanation for the apparent failure of the Theaetetus to come to a
satisfactory conclusion about the definition of knowledge.
Tschemplik argues that understanding this aporetic dialogue in
light of the fact that it was conducted with two noted
mathematicians shows that for Plato, mathematics was not the
paradigm for philosophy. She points out that, although mathematics
is clearly an important part of the philosopher's training, as the
educational outline of the Republic makes clear, the point on which
the mathematician falls short is the central role that
self-knowledge plays in philosophical investigation. Theaetetus
betrays this deficiency and is led by Socrates to an understanding
of the benefits of self-knowledge understood as the knowledge of
ignorance. Tschemplik concludes that it is the absence of
self-knowledge in the Theaetetus which leads to its closing impasse
regarding knowledge. This book will be of interest to scholars and
graduate students in the history of philosophy with a special
interest in ancient philosophy, and will also be accessible to
upper-level undergraduates in ancient philosophy.
Telecollaboration has been applied in foreign language education
for more than two decades. This corpus study on telecollaboration
in Third Language Learning has been carried out in institutional
(CEFR) and non-institutional settings following the principle of
autonomy in the framework of Higher Education implementing online
tandems and student recordings in order to analyze discourse
patterns. The chapters of this issue are original studies on corpus
data of the L3Task project reflecting findings and new research
paradigms and instruments that consolidate teaching and research
methodology on online tandem practice for third language learning.
This study presents a collection of papers by a variety of scholars
engaged in the most thought-provoking and salient problems in
various areas of linguistics. The book comprises ten chapters
organised into two parts.The first part, "Studies in Applied
Linguistics", elaborates on up-to-date and research-based knowledge
of the selected subjects in the discipline of Applied Linguistics.
It takes the reader from theoretical, linguistic considerations to
classroom practice. The second part, "Studies in Cognitive
Linguistics", concentrates on various aspects of cognitive
linguistic research.
First published in 1990, this book argues that any theory of
language constructs its 'object' by separating 'relevant' from
'irrelevant' phenomena - excluding the latter. This leaves a
'remainder' which consists of the untidy, creative part of how
language is used - the essence of poetry and metaphor. Although
this remainder can never be completely formalised, it must be fully
recognised by any true account of language and thus this book
attempts the first 'theory of the remainder'. As such, whether it
is language or the speaker who speaks is dealt with, leading to an
analysis of how all speakers are 'violently' constrained in their
use of language by social and psychological realties.
TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new
perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes
state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across
theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new
insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary
perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for
cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in
its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards
linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as
well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for
a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the
ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes
monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes,
which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from
different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality
standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your
book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.
This study analyzes the use of conceptual metaphors on Polish and
American internet forums for mothers. In order to achieve these
objectives, the author compiled a corpus consisting of ten thousand
posts from Polish internet forums and ten thousand posts from
American ones. The topics of threads were various, ranging from
giving advice on breastfeeding to sex during pregnancy. The study
contributes to a better understanding of online discussions - this
issue has not been frequently investigated, especially from a
comparative perspective.
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